Mystery Book Club Off-Shoot : 🏴 💀 🏯 黒死館殺人事件 🏯 💀 🏴 - Home Thread

Japanese Reading Book Clubs
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Welcome to the :black_flag: :skull: :japanese_castle: 黒死館殺人事件 :japanese_castle: :skull: :black_flag: Book Club!

View the book on Natively here !
View the nomination post (and subsequent discussion) here

黒死館殺人事件 finished first in the last Mystery Book Club poll, but as the club is on hiatus at the moment, if people are interested, I will run it as an off-shoot.

Obviously, the Natively rating is enough to scare people away. The point of the club is not to offer something unreadable, or un-enjoyable. I hope that reading this as a group might actually make it less daunting, and more fullfilling for every one.

When the book was nominated, the possiblity of an informal club was discussed. I have since had a look at the contents, and there are several possible schedules if we decided to run it in a more classic way.

So first of all, in order to gauge interest :

Will you be reading with the club ?
  • Count me in !
  • Let me think about it…
  • それはちょっと…
0 voters

And if you’re joining us, would you rather read informally, or on a schedule ? If informally, I’ll probably run a thread for each of the main chapters (there are 7 of them, the first 5, including the prologue, are of equal length, the last three are of varying length). If on a schedule, I’ve thought of 3 possibilities :

(I’m away from home and will only have access to my physical copy next monday, so I’ll add page counts then. The percentages are taken from the Aozora Bunko edition)

-A fast, 10-week schedule

Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 Column 4
Week number Chapters Percentage Page count
Sept 1 Prologue + Chapters 1.1 + 1.2 10%
Sept 8 Chapters 1.3 + 2.1 + 2.2 21%
Sept 15 Chapters 2.3 + 3.1 28%
Sept 22 Chapters 3.2 + 3.3 39%
Sept 29 Chapters 4.1 + 4.2 48%
Oct 6 Chapters 5.1 57%
Oct 13 Chapters 5.2 + 6.1 67%
Oct 20 Chapters 6.2 + 7.1 76%
Oct 27 Chapters 7.2 + 8.1 90%
Nov 3 Chapters 8.2 + 8.3 100%

-A 11-week schedule where we split week 8 in two, 6.2 and 7.1
-A 12-week schedule

Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 Column 4
Week number Chapters Percentage Page Count
Sept 1 Prologue + Chapter 1.1 6%
Sept 8 Chapters 1.2 + 1.3 13%
Sept 15 Chapters 2.1 + 2.2 21%
Sept 22 Chapters 2.3 + 3.1 28%
Sept 29 Chapters 3.2 + 3.3 39%
Oct 6 Chapters 4.1 + 4.2 48%
Oct 13 Chapter 5.1 57%
Oct 20 Chapters 5.2 + 6.1 67%
Oct 27 Chapters 6.2 + 7.1 76%
Nov 3 Chapter 7.2 82%
Nov 10 Chapter 8.1 90%
Nov 17 Chapter 8.2 + 8.3 100%
Would you rather read ?
  • informally
  • on the 10-week schedule
  • on the 11-week schedule
  • on the 12-week schedule
  • something else, but scheduled anyway
0 voters

I have the polls set to automatically close in 10 days.

Regardless of your answer, thank you for having a look at the club !

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I’m a little intimidated by the level, not gonna lie, but I’d like to put in a good faith effort if at all possible to try. (Helps quite a bit that it’s free, haha.) I’m not sure whether I’d prefer a scheduled or non-scheduled pace; one one hand, a schedule will be more likely to keep me on track, but on the other, if the book does end up being extremely difficult, it might just end up being more of a stressor than anything…

And unrelated, but should your :black_flag: and :skull: emojis change places in the title? Not that it’s important, I was just thinking, haha.

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Actually, I was thinking of :black_flag: :skull: :japanese_castle: 黒死館殺人事件 :japanese_castle: :skull: :black_flag:

:smiling_face:

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I like the symmetry!

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I was a bit doubtful when I saw the level, but what really did me in was the review by dorod:

Japanese ability alone is insufficient for this book. At times even the internet could not help with the questions that arose when reading it. From the first page to the last, there are hundreds of opportunities to dig deeper into the pedantic depths of this novel. Science, mathematics, music theory, cryptography, history, occultism, and above all, Japanese knowledge, are tested to varying degrees.

Given this judgment, plus the fact that the book is 500+ pages, I don’t see that a week 1 at 10% (~50 pages) will work for me. Maaaaybe 25 pages per week, at least until we got a bit of a foothold in the matter? :sweat_smile: (For reference, we are reading “hard” books in the WK Advanced Book Club at a pace of ~15 pages per week…) What do you think @Magyarapointe ?

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I’m open to all suggestions. we could go un-scheduled, or, simply, do just one chapter a week (by which I mean one sub chapter). That gives a 21-week schedule, on average 25 pages a week. I’m afraid splitting subchapters will make things more complicated.

As I said, if reading this becomes a chore, the club should be considered a failure, and that’s not the point. so maybe informal is best ?

To give you an idea : I’ve started ahead, and within the first ten pages or so, there are references to the Italian Renaissance, heraldry, Jesuits, etc… Here’s the Aozora Bunko text, if you want to get a better idea.

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:popcorn:

Considering how dense the book is, my hunch a more relaxed pagecount is basically the only way this is going to work (even if you end u with a 20+ week schedule). Tbh I think this is a pretty poor BK book choice, but the public has spoken and I’m prepared to be entertained by the results regardless :slight_smile:

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:steam_locomotive: :fire: :fire_engine:

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Thank you @Magyarapointe for recommending this book and organizing this book club.

I prefer having an informal schedule arranged by main chapters so that it’s easier to participate in discussions.

I’m planning to read this book only (not reading other novels while reading this one) and hoping to finish it in 1-2 months.

But if it’s too difficult, I will probably abandon it within the first week :joy:

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That sounds like a wild start. I’m very interested in reading this book, but I agree that a slow pace seems like a good idea. :sweat_smile:

A sub chapter a week sounds good to me. I’m also generally not opposed to an unscheduled club, but maybe we could use the support of a schedule with this one. :face_with_peeking_eye:

I was planning to read the free aozora ebook, but this is making me want to get the physical to maybe take some notes in.

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Yeah, that sounds much better to me :sweat_smile: Maybe we’ll realize after a few weeks that the references are not so hard (or not so necessary) to understand, then I am happy to have another discussion about the pace.

My feeling is (just like @Belerith mentioned as well) that unscheduled works well for a club where everybody reads the assignment and then shares their ideas and impressions. But if this text is really so dense as I fear it might be, then it would be better for me to have a schedule where we can discuss and chew on these issues while everybody is reading them roughly at the same time. Again, I may be wrong, but that was my impression from the review I quoted earlier.

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I’m definitely with nikoru here; starting with a much slower schedule, at least at first to get our bearings, sounds great.

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@eefara @nikoru @Belerith One sub-chapter a week is absolutely fine with me. To be honest, that was the very first schedule I thought of, and then I worried people would think it was too slow !

@xnd521 What I’m planning at the moment is setting up the threads in advance (not all of them, but maybe a week or two ahead), with info about the references (as many as I can, anyway), so people might have something to refer to without having to stop every paragraph to search the internet. That also means more flexibility for reading ahead. Would something like that suit you ?

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Would it be worth considering hosting everything in one thread? Or having one thread per chapter? I’m just thinking that there may potentially be little enough conversation that having a thread per subthread would end up with emptier threads.

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Maybe absolutely everything in one thread will be difficult. But a main reference thread and then chapter threads with subchapters inside ? it’s not quite the same kind of book of course, but for the ミーナの行進 club, there have been (at least in the beginning) threads by 10-chapter groups, and people just preface their comment with whatever week/chapter they’re referencing. That might better, considering each main chapter is two or three sub-chapters long.

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Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me.

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@Magyarapointe that would be great! :raised_hands:

Earlier, I was thinking about my two book club experiences and realized that if the schedule is too long, people tend to forget what happened in the book because they have to read other books in between. And if the other book happens to be more interesting, they might want to finish that first before returning to this book. As a result, no one will be posting comments based on the original schedule. By the time someone posts or comments, it might be difficult for people on schedule to reply without giving out spoilers. That’s why I planned to concentrate and read only this book.

Since the majority prefers a schedule, I’m fine with it as well since having people read and share their thoughts is much more enjoyable than reading alone. :blush:

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What’s the difference between this version and the Aozora Bunko version besides the cover?

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As far as I know, none, it’s just that I can’t give physical page numbers right now. In case someone wanted to have a clearer picture of how long each section is.

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Thank you!! I’m curious about the pages too.

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